This proposal is concerned with the question, how does the listener use context and previous knowledge in constructing the interpretation of a sentence. This question will be approached from three directions. first, it is proposed that people make use of a so-called Given-New Strategy in comprehension. They attempt to separate out in a sentence that information they already know (the Given information) from what they do not already know (the New information) and then use this Given information as an instruction as to where to put the New information in memory. This very general proposal will be tested in a series of experiments. Second, it is proposed that people come to construct the intended, rather than the literal, meaning of an utterance by combining the literal meaning, the immediate context, and certain rules of conversation in a process of deducing the intended meaning. By such a strategy, they can construe, for example, the literal question "Can you open the door?" as a polite request to open the door, which is what the speaker intended it to mean. The consequences of this theory will be tested in a series of experiments. Third, there will be a series of experiments to test the notion that certain English constructions have associated with them perceptual criteria the listener must satisfy before he can apply that construction to a particular perceptual event. These experiments will be concerned especially with such spacial adjectives as "high," "low," "long," "short," and the like.